Where do I start with Nietzsche? What order should I read his works in?

Where do I start with Nietzsche? What order should I read his works in?

>inb4 start with the Greeks (or Stirner)

if you haven't read the Greeks, you have no business reading Nietzsche who constantly references and is explicitly influenced by them.

That being said, the more of him you read the better you understand any of him

He wrote On the Genealogy of Morals with the intention of having the rest of his work more accessible, so I would start with that

Yeah. I intended to read the Greeks but there's so much of them (I've read some). Thought I'd dive straight into neitzsche then go back to the Greeks then re read neitzsche. I'm not a professional or anything I'm just reading it for a hobby

You can't start with an author without starting with the Greeks if said author himself started with the Greeks.

Does reading being your hobby somehow mean that you intend on trying to understand as little as possible in order to maximize the pleasure you get from reading?

Reading sufficient levels of Greeks will bring much more depth to many of the texts that you read. Missing that depth means missing out on major portions of the thing you're participating in.

If you think i'm playing up a meme, just remember that there are people browsing this very board who have read Nietzsche and think that he was a Nihilist

Nietzsche was a nihilist, he also thought that the consequences of nihilism were going to be destructive.

Don't read Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Bloom is right, Zarathustra is a sublime bore

No it doesn't mean trying to get as little as possible, just that I have to balance the reading w other things in my life.

I will read the Greeks too and I know he wasn't a nihilist. But I was just sort of after a good guide on what order to read him in

How was Nietzsche not a nihilist?

Read the Greeks if you feel you don't know about the Greeks. There's absolutely no need to read something like Aristotle's Organon if you want to understand Nietzsche. And unless you study their books for 2+ years you won't get any insight about the bigger picture of their society and culture - which is what interested Nietzsche the most - and you will still read his ideas as if you hadn't started at all with the Greeks.

Also, everybody knows that you're supposed to start with The Gay Science.

He believed values and meaning exist, can be created.

ppl say the greeks and stirner a lot because its where you should actually start. stop being lazy

If he can call Christianity nihilism, I can call him nihilism.

Of course he believed that values can be created, but he didn't believe they really existed with any moral foundation. This is why Nietzsche believed that morality was, in essence, a power struggle. Nietzsche did claim to show in the future his transvaluation of values where values were to rest on actual solid premises but he was unable to do so. Presumably because he recognised that such a foundation did not exist.

Regarding the meaning of life: the notions of amor fati (and eternal recurrence which is really an applied extension of amor fati) is really just a psychological mechanism to try and overcome the nihilism that is beneath everything.

Nietzsche tries to act like the hard man that nihilism isn't at the bottom of everything, but in fact his concepts are just psychological attempts to try to overcome this.

Nietzsche is a nihilist.

You dont need to read the Greeks, this is just LARPing.

Either start with the Birth of Tragedy or the Genealogy of Morals (preferably the latter)

Nihilism is overrated anyway. An ordinary human, like any other creature, will always find meaning in basic stuff like reproduction and comfort without the need to be told by a more powerful being what to do. I bet that every person who calls himself a nihilist or is afraid of nihilism actually is a beta loser who needs to blames his sadness on something else beyond his flawed personality.

no he is a christian

Aristotle's Organon is essential to understanding (or at least for recognizing the importance of) all of the philosophers who are more important than Nietzsche: Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, etc.

Also, what the fuck is up with all of the retards on Veeky Forums who want to read meme philosophers like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer without any background in the subject at all? Reading somebody like Plato or Aristotle, simply as an end, rather than a means, is a far better use of your time than reading more modern philosophers.

Not everybody wants to study the history of philosophy and/ or not everybody is willing to shun all other interesting fields in favor of philosophy. The ideas of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza are very dated and quite irrelevant to our times when compared to those of more recent thinkers. Not saying they're not important, I'm saying that starting with them will take too much time away from the relevant discussions of our days.

No. You need to read the greeks. Follow the entire path.
Since the pre-socratics and sofists until Schopenhauer. Then you can start with Nietszche.

Good luck.

The Greeks
Max Stirner
Then The Portable Nietzsche

Nietzsche needs an update though. He could be so spot on and yet incredibly blind the next paragraph.

Btw it's important to stress that while Greek philosophy is kind of important for Nietzsche, Greek poetry and tragedy is far far far more important in understanding his work, and you should focus not exclusively but with a good amount of attention on that.

>the ideas of aristotle descartes spinoza are very dated and irrelevant
but that's simply wrong you fucking retard. Nobody today(nobody ever) picks up Nico Ethics, Ethics, or Meditations and treats it like as some guidebook to living life and understanding the world. But there are modern philosophers (Anscombe, Delueze, Heidegger) who DIRECTLY engage with Aristotle, Spinoza, and Descartes to do the work that they were doing in the 20th century.

You sound like an ignorant redditor.

>trying to overcome nihilism is nihilism
easy there buckaroo

I didn't quite specify what to read, but this is accurate

I personally haven't see particular guides. But as I said earlier: The more of him you read the more you will understand. But I would read him in "stages", that is, it's generally okay to start with any one book in a stage but it's best that you finish a stage before you move onto the next. I staged them only because I think Stage 1 doesn't require as much reading of Nietzsche's other works as stage 3.


Stage 1: Essay-format works and a sort-of autobiography
>1. On the Genealogy of Morals
>2. Ecce Homo
>3. The Birth of Tragedy

Stage 2: The "meat" of his work. These three usually go together. Many of his central ideas come out. Many poems and aphorisms. Highly dense material.

>1. The Gay Science
>2. Thus Spoke Zarathustra
>3. Beyond Good and Evil

Stage 3: Other important works. With twilight and antichrist he develops some concepts that were only alluded to in his other works. Human all too human is an earlier work but i think is better understood in the context of his latter stuff. Phil in the tragic age is a very interesting take on Greeks, and helps one understand how he engaged with the authours he read. Things that aren't included I can't say much about.

>1. Twilight of the Idols
>2. AntiChrist
>3. Human all too human
>4. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

Christianity is nihilistic, the heavenly paradise followers are promised makes them stop taking their lives seriously or plan ahead for the world once they die.

Modern nihilism is a result of liberal and communist influence. Liberalism and communism are offshoots of Christianity.

But that's because you have to prepare for the life to come. Nietzsche doesn't take the idea of an afterlife seriously so he thinks that's ridiculous, but it's not ridiculous--and hence not nihilistic--to people who believe the afterlife is real.

What are your opinions on translators? I'm just getting into Nietzsche, after reading Douglas Smith's translation of the Birth of Tragedy, which was fine but had some flaws even I could pick up. Like there was a particularly effusive passage about Wagner where N. talked about him leading Germany into a new age or something, and the translator thought it was necessary to put an endnote to the effect of "wow I know he's talking about Wagner but isn't it spooky to pretend he's talking about Hitler", which suggests a weird bias against Nietzsche (as in what kind of serious expert really still think N. was a nazi).

Anyway, Hollingdale, Kaufmann, or those fancy new Stanford University PressTranslations that I've seen recommended? What do we think?

Aristotle is more relevant now than he was from Leibnitz tup to the 20th century.

Frivolous post

OP here. Thanks for this post

Great, thanks user.

He very explicitly despised nihilism and saw it as the destruction of society

>Nietzsche was a nihilist
Hi Hank Green

How can someone whose philosophy invigorates the entire world with meaning and holds it as beautiful be nihilistic?

Just read Dostoevsky, at least it's enjoyable.

Nietzsche even said "Dostoevsky,the only psychologist from whom I've anything to learn."